Can anyone tell me what this means? I trying to render a video in the timeline using uncompressed AVI. I've done this a million times before but never got this message until yesterday. I now can't even render the simpliest of videos. Even exporting to other formats won't work. Only Microsoft DV AVI works but I don't like the quality. Something serious is going on here. My job is at steak. I haven't changed anything on my computer. I remember doing some updates not too long ago but don't remember if it was on Premier Pro CS3. I have all the latest updates/bug fixes.

It was two logos at 300 dpi about 1500 pixels. Originally I thought it was them because I recieved an error during preview render, so I converted to psd instead of PNG. So the preview rendered ok but then the final output wouldn't work. I've done hi rez files before in FCP so I didn't think it would be a problem. But once the timeline got corrupt I think I also needed to restart and do a new project so all the things you said needed to be checked and/or done. The only thing I had covered was the scratch disks.

I'm still a little miffed the Premiere Pro cant actually tell me what the error was or where it was coming from. Priemier Pro SHOULDN'T EVEN LET A FILE IT CAN'T HANDLE INTO THE PROJECT OR TIMELINE. In this day and age you would think a stupid thing like this would be solved or fixed. Com on guys at ADOBE...you should be ASHAMED...so many people have this problem..

What format are the audio files in? mp3, wav, aif?
Some mp3 or mp4 based audio formats can be rogue and PPro won't like them very much. You must make sure your audio is all wav or aif format. You can reformat them separately in another project and then replace them in the timeline of your edit, by unlinking and relinking them to the wavs.
Hope this helps. Otherwise, goto Project>remove unused. It should clean up your project. ALso delete rendered from Sequence>...
Then export it.
- Jon :)

If you are having issues converting the aif files into wav I'd say that's the problem there. The aif file/s are conflicting somehow. Aif is acceptable and I use it all the time so it's not that PPro is not able to use it. It seems the aif file is not completely clean. There is a hiccup in it that's come from the original export of it. If you have audio software like audition or soundbooth, even QT pro you can open the aif files in there and re-export them to wav. then replace them in PPro. Without seeing the timeline I can't tell you what else might be causing the issue.
Have all the files you are using in 1 folder (pref on a separate hard drive) and reconnect all your media to that one folder.
- Jon :)

Dear Randy,
you are truly a God send...Thank you for not hiding your light under a bushel basket and sharing with the rest of us. I could not for the life of me figure out why some of my project's time-lines wouldn't export without crashing and then I found your post...bigger is NOT better with jpgs...I resized all 20 from 3400 wide down to 1500 wide and it's exporting without breaking a sweat.

Thanks and if you're ever in Florida around the Tampa area drop me a line and we'll have a drink.

I get the same error messege when I am exporting video. When I drop the frame size to 960 540 the sequence will render. My edited sequence is about 8 min long and was captured in HD. I have tried what you said but am unable to get a high quality render. Hopefully I can figure this out so I can render at 1920x1080.

when u have nothing else left but you have to deliver your project, try the two camera technique one with analogue or s-video in, then connect the i link to camera 1 (can be a simple dv camcorder) to the pc Then connect camera 1 to cam 2 (one with video input) via the analogue cables provided. the just play from premiere and it goes thru the chains of cams and record it on dv tape, though quality will suffer a bit but well... I said earlier that thats when u have no option left.
Man it saved my ass once.
if the analogue and rca or s video cables are incompatible, add a tv set with video in and out to the chain and in between the cameras(you know what i mean)

All other projects open just fine. This happened all of a sudden after I added a rolling title at the end of the 1,5 hour movie. I have searched and searched the internet for any kind of clues and or solutions, but with no luck what so ever... I even tried to open the "auto-save" copies, it opened once - crashed - and then I was back at square one again.

It's driving me crazy because like John, my job and reputation is on the line. Any help or suggestion would be very much appreciated.

It's a compiling and render error in Premier Pro on preview rendering bad/corrupt/odd codec Quicktime movies. Premier Pro seems to be able to only render and use a small portion of certain Quicktime movies that are imported into the timeline using certain conversion codecs. I have a big music video I was working on and was using bought stock footage from I-Stock and Artbeats. I took all the quicktime video clips and converted them to Uncompressed avi's and the problem went away. No more Quicktime movies in Premier Pro for me until this is fixed. I'm only using Quicktime in Final Cut. I will say that when I do make my own animations in After Effects using the Quciktime format I don't seem to be having any problems using those in the timeline. But I always save them to Uncompressed and no codec used.

I've encountered this problem over a hundred times because i had to use that quicktime codec for my transparency videos and i tried everything on the net i could find but only one thing has worked for me.

This is going to sound a little unprofessional but try closing your program monitor. It works for me every time. It used to take 10 to 30 tries before it would click and start rendering but i tried that and it starts up right away.

My projects mainly consisted of hdv (60i) and a single sound track with effects by the way

I have just started using a canon fs100 and transferring the files from .mod to .dv in Streamclip with an old version of quicktime. Now my boss sat down and polished a project for 6 hours... he saved, and I saved under a different name and location. both files will not open in premier pro cs3 with message VideoSegment.cpp-55.

I'm having the same problem....upon exporting, an error menu pops up and then closes everything! this is very frustrating!! can someone please help me out!!!! I tried everything already posted on this thread!!!!!

Hello,
I wonder, have you guys been able to solve the problems with this error. I am having the unknown error compiling movie when I render the effects in the timeline. In the beginning I could use rics as to make a smaller workspace to render, but now I am stuck. The error occurs continuesly.

Did you find out what was going on. Could you help. I have tried all possibl esuggestions in this thread and on other forums. Is it surely a software (cs3) issue. Could it be hardware related. Would I be out of problems if I upgraded to cs4?

Thanks Eddie,
I have tried lots of possibilities mentioned in the link you supplied and in other posts and forums. Nothing so far seems to help.

I am working with app 150 mt2 files (IN THE SEQUENCE REDUCED TO APP 1/2 HOUR) which is more or less the same as avi. For the rest I use many titles and speed up clips. Also I import some Standard Definition clips in my HDV project in a different layer (different video track I mean). I do ask much from the software BUT I have the same problem in small projects with only a few minuites of clips. And the errors sometimes occur even when I only try to render a simple still title.

What would you suggest? I was thinking of upgrading to cs4 if only i was sure that that would solve the problem. Or might there be a hardware problem? I am running a quad core machine.

I have been doing some more detailed observations regarding rendering the timeline. It turns out that I only get errors at titles. When I remove all titles, there is no problem at all.

As I mentioned in previous mails, when I open the title generator I get a message that Premiere is running low on system memory. It seems that something is going on with the titles. Would that information maybe help in solving the problem??

I have the same problem and can not solve. Checked all your suggestions, but the video preview error comes back. Did somebody find out something new? Rob, how did you solve it? I assume that titles or transitions are maybe the problem. I rendered each video-timeline by there own, that works without getting the error, but when i tried to export everything the error came again. sucks.

Try changing the name of the project. This helps for a while.
If not, try to find where exactly the error is caused. Remove the file (usually a title) and render first without that file. Put it back and render again.

"Try changing the name of the project. This helps for a while." What kind of solution or answer is that? Sorry but this problem with rendering in Premiere Pro should NOT be happening. Especially when using the Text creation tool in premiere Pro. If you try and use a font that may be corrupt maybe yes. But we all seem to be having this problem and I'm included in this on occasion. Now I'm finding out that my favorite plugin from Video CoPilot..."Twitch" does NOT pre Render in the Timeline so I can see if the effect is ok for me. I make the effects from Aftereffects and import the video in the timeline and save the effect. Half the effect wont prerender. I went through all the scenarios from all the contributing answers here in the forum. Thank you guys. A lot of you are right about using still images with too high a resolution...etc. Really frustrating to still be getting these errors. I wish there was some way that when the error occurs that Premier Pro would tell me what is causiing the problem instead of giving me the general error message. Too much extra work and backtracking. Frustrating.

Thanks for the input on image resolution. And the program monitor tip. I've had to do this when my video card was acting up. Querky indeed.

Actually, John, I'd hate to tarnish your beloved FCP, but I run into the same EXACT problem with MOST .psd files in Final Cut. The program crashes, the sequence is corrupt. So I dig through the auto-save vault to find a recent version of my sequence, copy it all, paste it into a new sequence, and (as directed by the FCP staff) convert all .psd files to .png. Final Cut is great for story-tell editing. I use it as an in house editor part-time. But when working with photoshop files, handed down from a graphic designer, it's a pain to make every layer a png. That is, if the animations don't require After Effects.

I had the exact same problem everyone else is having, and did all the tweaks and troubleshooting outlined here and everywhere else. I was a week past the deadline on a color grading job and just didn't know what to do. I watched the render progress, taking careful note as to which frame it was on when it crashed and was able to find the exact clip causing the problems. I had a Magic Bullet Look Suite effect applied causing the render to fail at that exact clip with "error compiling movie." I've used this damn effect 50 times before and never had a problem. I just didn't get it. If I ereased the effect and re-did it, it would work. Hmmm.

Then it dawned on me. When I was through with color grading the entire movie (but before I attempted the encoding), I downloaded a trial of Magic Bullet Looks, which is different and much better than Look Suite. I dropped the Premiere plugins into the plugins folder and then did some moving around of the plugin files.

My theory was...just like when you move a video file around after importing and dropping into your timeline....Premiere asks where you moved it too. But with plugins, Premiere doesn't know where you moved it to and is unable to render the effect...but it doesn't ask you where it is.

I realized that I needed to place the MB Look Suite plugin in it's previous place, therefore making Premire "find" it, but I didn't know where it used to be before I moved it. So, I copied the plugin and proceeded to paste a copy of it in every single sub-folder withing the plugin folder.

When I went to encode the movie....not only did it render seamlessly without any errors of any kind...it was about 50% faster at rendering.

So a word of advice....if you want to move your plugin files, make sure there are no unfinished projects on your computer, or export the project to a clean file before you start messing around.

Thanks for your reply...Yes I have Quicktime 7.6.2 installed. That''s one of the first things I looked into since it was a major cause of previous problems. Still in this day and age...crashes like this should not be happening. Adobe gets a ton of money for their products and they crash more often than some free programs I use. At least give me an error with an explanation so I can fix it....and not guess to what is wrong. The fact that problems like this has been happening for years and been mentioned in this forum and still not fixed or addressed with a concrete explanation make me wonder.

Actually, I've had the same pop up multiple times. I also remember the "Premiere pro is running low on memory" warning as well. I'm a student that is using the program for a school project that is actually due quite soon. I'm awfully confused and stressed at this point because i've tried all that I can, and I do not even have much in the timeline. I have a few tracks of audio, mostly still graphics, and a couple of video clips. I've tried exporting earlier while I was putting the film together(i had 3 min of film & 5 min of audio) to make sure it worked and it worked fine. For some reason, now I have about 10 minutes and it absolutely does not work for me. Any suggestions? I would really appreciate some help.

I experienced this same problem exporting a wedding video timeline as Avid DNxHD and found the following solution:
If you move the Rendering Dialogue Box (before clearing the error message) you can see which frame the export process stalled. I then navigated in the timeline to this frame and identified the clip affected. Using the Slide tool I shifted the clip a couple of frames to the left (or right). The clip then exported successfully.
I have no idea why this worked. I didn't have any gaps, non-iframe video clips or non-wav audio in the timeline.
Just one of those things I guess? Hope this helps.